In the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, a large number of cinemas were built in both the urban and rural areas of South India. Their architecture is an unusual mix of Western influences and local building styles. The brightly coloured façades resemble stage sets and provide a foretaste of the film experience in the auditorium, where the extravagant forms and embellishments are continued, getting the audience in the mood for the cinematic world before the opening credits roll. One might call this architectural language a kind of hybrid modernism. Many of these cinemas have been maintained in their original state. However, in the big cities, the process of converting them into multiplexes has already begun. Haubitz+Zoche’s photographs from the period 2010 – 2013 document a piece of cinema culture that has already for the most part disappeared in Europe and the USA and is being increasingly displaced in India by commercial interests.

Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has developed its own image culture, with public space serving primarily as a transit zone and a screen where state-sanctioned religious ideology is projected. Pride of place is given to memorials to the first Gulf war (the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–88), which is part of the founding myth of the Islamic Republic. Between 2011 and 2014 Oliver Hartung produced a work on Iran, typological series of images depicting monuments, murals, architecture, and war cemeteries. In it he creates a portrait of an exceptionally photogenic country that is nevertheless largely unknown in the West: in Damghan a colossal ear of wheat acts as a street lamp and in Isfahan a hand grenade with an Internet symbol suggests the potential risks inherent in the world wide web. The names of the places where the photos were taken are provided in English.

He describes himself self-deprecatingly as the “most famous unknown artist”: Frank Uwe Laysiepen aka Ulay. With his concept of transformation, he constantly creates new identities. His preferred medium is photography — initially, in the form of the Polaroid, photography became an integral part of his earliest artistic practice. For Ulay the instant picture, which has now been replaced by the digital image, is the material in his decade-long search for a way to represent life. To this day, his body serves as the object of his research, on which various influences leave traces and can be read, just like on a canvas. The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents the first-ever major overview of the works of the artist, which will be accompanied by a catologue covering photographs, performance art pieces, and works that Ulay has kept private for years and which are now being made public for the first time. (Ulay, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 13, October 2016 to 8, January 2017) Text: Maria Rus Bojan, Noah Charney, Ann Demeester, Sophie Duplaix, Rudolf Frieling, Chrissie Iles, Dominic Johnson, Amelia Jones, Thomas McEvilley, Lyle Rexer, Beate Söntgen, Matthias Ulrich

Assignments can give instructions, describe an exercise, present a problem, set out rules, propose a game, stimulate a process, or simply throw out questions. Taking a Line for a Walk brings attention to something that is often neglected: the assignment as a pedagogical element and verbal artefact of design education. This book is a compendium of 224 assignments, edited by Nina Paim and coedited by Emilia Bergmark. A reference book for educators, researchers, and students alike, it includes both contemporary and historical examples and offers a space for different lines of design pedagogy to converge and converse. An accompanying essay by Corinne Gisel takes a closer look at the various forms assignments can take and the educational contexts they exist within. Taking a Line for a Walk derived from an exhibition of the same name at the International Biennial of Graphic Design Brno 2014.

Catalogue raisonné and artist book: TXT IMG brings together forty-one projects by Katharina Gaenssler, from her first photo installation in 2003 up to her latest project Bauhaus Staircase on display on the stairs of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Like her photo installations, where hundreds of single images come together to create a large-scale work, this monograph is shaped by the contrast between the fragment and the whole. It includes all the thirty-four texts that have been written to date about Gaenssler’s work and every one of the 407,954 photographs she has taken to provide the material basis for her projects. The myriad tiny individual images combine on the pages of the book to form abstract colour sequences – taken as a whole they can be interpreted anew, becoming a photographic manifestation somewhere between a colour code and a dynamic spatial expanse.

This book is published to coincide with the exhibition Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Scrapbook of the Sixties is a collection of published and unpublished texts by Jonas Mekas, filmmaker, writer, poet, and cofounder of the Anthology Film Archives in New York. Born in Lithuania, he came to Brooklyn via Germany in 1949 and began shooting his first films there. Mekas developed a form of film diary in which he recorded moments of his daily life. He became the barometer of the New York art scene and a pioneer of American avant-garde cinema. Every week, starting in 1958, he published his legendary “Movie Journal” column in The Village Voice, writing on a range of subjects that were by no means restricted to the world of film. He conducted numerous interviews with artists like Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Erick Hawkins, and Nam June Paik. Some of these will now appear for the first time in his Scrapbook of the Sixties. Mekas’s writings reveal him as a thoughtful diarist and an unparalleled chronicler of the times—a practice that he has continued now for over fifty years.

Jonas Mekas (*1922, Semeniškiai / Lithuania), lives and works in New York. Film-maker, writer, poet and co-founder of the Anthology Film Archives one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. Mekas’s work has been exhibited in museums and festivals worldwide.

According to legend, the house in which Maria received the apparition of the Angel of Annunciation, the Santa Casa, was relocated by angels from Nazareth first to Dalmatia and then to Loreto. Since the 15th century, the Santa Casa of Loreto has become one of the most important Christian pilgrimage sites. In 2009, the artists Davide Cascio and Christian Kathriner developed a work that refers back to this legend. They created two wall carpets for the pilgrimage chapel of Our Lady of Hergiswald — a replica of the Santa Casa in Loreto. The wall carpets, Jacquard tapestries, were woven on a CAD-operated loom in Flanders. The tapestries show a group of people apparently resting at the edge of a riverbed. The large-scale publication presents this temporary spatial installation by Davide Cascio and Christian Kathriner in striking color images that at the same time absorb the opulent decoration of the Baroque chapel of Hergiswald and simultaneously refract it within a contemporary aesthetics.

»Ape Culture« traces the long cultural and scientific obsession with humanity’s closest relatives. In the Western historical representations of modernity, depictions of apes were traditionally used to show the absence of culture. Standing as a liminal figure separating humans and animals, the ape has, since ancient times, played a central role in the narrative of civilisational progress. This book, which appears in conjunction with the exhibition of the same nameseeks, however, to go beyond the mere examination of apes as signifiers of difference. The juxtaposition of artworks with documents taken from popular culture and the history of primatology gives the reader an insight into what the science historian Donna Haraway has termed the »primate order« — a hall of mirrors reflecting the scientific and cultural projections that turned the ape from an instrument of humanity’s self-definition into an integral element in testing out the possibility of reconstructing human »nature«. »Ape Culture« will be shown at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt from 30 April to 6 July 2015.

Representations of animals are ubiquitous: from advertising hoardings, newspapers, books, magazines, and television shows, to the hundreds of thousands of images uploaded every day to the Internet. During the last twenty years, artists, too, have engaged with the animal in an effort to articulate more “beastly” visions. How can animals as autonomous creative entities take possession of an unshackled imaginative space cut loose from the human? Beastly/ Tierisch has an innovative, visually daring design, superimposing a selection of artistic works onto a host of pictures from the Internet. This rich image material is supplemented by four essays: about animality and the history of photography (Duncan Forbes), the political and philosophical animal (Slavoj Žižek), the virtual zoo of the Internet (Ana Teixeira Pinto), and the changing identities of animals under anthropogenic pressures (Heather Davis).